This is an old post, but I think it's still important to debunk the following misinformation:
Jim@StratusPrep wrote:My honest opinion is that you should think about taking the exam again. You definitely have an OUTSTANDING score, but it will serve you to get the quant a bit closer to the 80th percentile for the top programs.
It is absolutely NOT TRUE that you should aim for 80th percentile in quant anymore! That may have been true decades ago, but changes to student scores internationally in recent years now mean that you'd need an almost-perfect score to get an 80+ percentile on quant these days.
IGNORE YOUR PERCENTILES! That is NOT what schools look at when they are evaluating your scores! They look at your overall score and your subscore for the quant and verbal sections.
If you're looking at the percentiles rather than the subscores, you're getting the wrong impression. It is the subscore - not the percentile - that indicates your ability level. These scores range from 0-51, and they don't change over time. As Larry Rudner, former Chief Psychomatrician for GMAC, says, "The GMAT scale [sub] scores represent the same ability level over time. Thus, a Quant score of 43 in 2002 represents the exact same level of ability as a Quant score of 43 does in 2011."
The percentiles, on the other hand, have changed significantly over time. When the test was originally developed, an overwhelming majority of test takers were US citizens. In 2015, though, only 34% of the roughly 250,000 test takers who took the GMAT were US citizens*.
The net impact of these shifting demographics, as Rudner says, is that "the means and standard deviations of the Quant and Total scores have gone up, but those of the Verbal scores have gone down." If your Quant percentile looks low but your verbal looks high, this is more of a reflection on the global pool of test takers than it is on you.
Business schools don't look at percentiles.
Don't listen to any sources that tell you to aim for a particular percentile. Ten years ago, a Quant raw score of 47 out of 51 was 81st percentile. Today, that same score is only a 63rd percentile. But business schools know that this represents the same skill level now as it did then, so they don't care what the percentile is. Jeremy Shinewald, founder of our admissions consulting partner, mbaMission, recently told me, "Admissions officers know the GMAT well and they are not confused by the percentiles. Fundamentally, they want to know that you can manage the coursework, and your raw score is a clearer indicator of your abilities than the percentile, because it is consistent over time."
More information here:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... mat-score/
